IGN: What sort of new monster types, what sort of new enemies should people expect to fight?

Ben Miller: The dungeons themselves are full of some brand new monster types. There's the Destroyers, they're not the Great Destroyers, but the Destroyers in general, it's one of the most expansive armies that we've done and you'll fight them throughout Eye of the North. Any respectable dungeon could not be done without its fair share of dungeon creatures. We have some pretty awesome ooze monsters that you end up fighting that split apart and come together and do cool, ooze-like things. You get to fight new Charr. We've expanded the Charr army that you get to fight to include some brand new types and have some brand new mechanics.

IGN: What do they look like and what would those mechanics be?

Ben Miller: There's some white tiger striped looking Charr. And then as far as the mechanics go, for the first time ever they're dual professioned. We want to make the Charr feel more like you're fighting intelligent creatures, so they'll use skill builds that draw from two professions.

IGN: Do they use more advanced AI team tactics than other enemies might?

Ben Miller: We've gotten some better tools to make monster encounters a little cooler. So the Charr for example, we could set up some boss encounters where there's a Charr in the middle where his warriors will ring him or Charr that march in formation. That kind of stuff that you haven't seen before in Guild Wars.

IGN: Have you made any changes to hero AI?

Ben Miller: Nothing drastic. We're not trying to make them try to do anything different. Since we've released them in Nightfall and moving forward we've just fixed bugs and problems and addressed player concerns with them. They're not going to play crazily different, they'll just play a little bit cleaner and a little bit tighter just because we've had time to clean up their code.

IGN: Is it a more relaxed atmosphere at ArenaNet now that Eye of the North is almost out or is it more stressful with the sequel on the way?

Ben Miller: [laughs] Part of the design process is that after doing this, this being the fourth time, we're getting a little bit better about scheduling our time about what we can and can't do. Overall it's, I think it's more excited than stressful.

IGN: It just seems like you guys would have had to be in crunch mode for two years.

Ben Miller: [laughs] No, no, no. The thing is is that we're, as far as the design team is concerned, we're getting to pull out all the stops and getting to do all the things we always said we wanted to do, but had to devote our time and creative resources to making a brand new campaign. This time around it's more of a playful atmosphere than anything else. If it's cool and it's fun, it's probably going to go in.

IGN: Is there a cohesive visual theme for Eye of the North?

Ben Miller: The cohesive theme of Eye of the North is kick ass. But to seriously answer your question, we're drawing heavily on the first campaign. The Charr homeland looks very similar to what Pre-Searing Ascalon looked like. The Far Shiverpeaks look like an incredibly beautiful version of the Shiverpeak mountains. The Tarnished Coast looks like an incredibly epic, beautiful, kick ass version of the Maguuma Jungle. This by far, aesthetically, hands-down is the most gorgeous thing we have ever, ever, ever done. But we had that foundation to draw on from Prophecies. As far as that visual theme goes, it's basically a more awesome version of some of the areas you saw in Prophecies - because it's all part of the same world, so, it wouldn't make sense for us to drastically change anything.

IGN: You're still using the free to play model with Eye of the North and you need one of the previous games to run it right?

IGN: Are you thinking at all of some sort of - I know a lot of Korean games are free to play but you can go to a website and pay to download a bunch of in-game items.

Chris Lye: It's a little too early to say, but one of the things we respect a great deal about working with NCsoft is they give us here a lot of latitude to explore different revenue models. And so we're looking at a lot of stuff right now, but as far as the Guild Wars family of games, it's buy the game and play it for as much or as little as you want to. We may do some additional things, but nothing that's going to fundamentally change that model.

IGN: Would you be able to go online and buy gameplay altering items - things that would give paying customers an advantage over non-paying customers?

Chris Lye: We've had a lot of internal discussion about that and there's some really strong design reasons why we don't think that'd be a good idea.